Major Exploit, Infinite Limited Buildings and Placing Space Limited Buildings Next to Eachother

[BugReportTempAccount2]

This exploit works on any buildings that can be captured and are not territory roots.
Buildings/units that are not your own do not take up your cap of that building or your unit cap. The issue is that you are able to give your own buildings to Gaia removing them from your territory, which then allows you to build more, which you can capture back. One way you can do this by placing farmsteads at the edge of your territory in a line then placing a tower one far enough away, then putting the building in the tower's territory, then demolishing the farmsteads and waiting for Gaia to take it. If you have a teammate not on your team have them capture your siege unit/Wonder/Imperial Ministry/Winter Palace then capture it back after building another one for infinite trickle/population.

You can also place buildings that cannot be placed near each other like towers/fortresses next to ones you do not own then recapture them.

This appears to be already patched on the Revered Monument and Edict Pilliar of Ashoka by removing their capture points.


Examples of the issue:
The Kennel increases the maximum amount of dogs, with this exploit you can have unlimited dogs.
The Large Pyramid increases attack damage, this exploit allows you to have absurd attack bonuses.
The Theatre is difficult to exploit, but with enough Theatres you can remove the territory of all of your opponents and build anywhere even next to their Civic Center!
You can place a lot of stone towers next to each other to make a crazy amount of arrows.
You can put a multiple Temple of Vestas to make your structures impossible to capture.
Multiple Small Pyramids can make gather speed instant.
Ice Houses for infinite food trickle.
If you somehow got 21 Grand Temple of Amun then brought a hero into the range you might be able to make their health negative or underflow.

The limited building issue can be fixed in a few ways I can think of:
Remove capture points from limited buildings. (No fun)
Limit limited buildings across every player on the map. (Also no Fun)

The minimum space apart can be fixed in a few ways aswell:
Minimum distance across all players for them. (You cannot place towers near other people's towers, which kinda sucks.)
Don't fix it at all. (I doubt that it would be a good strategy anyways.)

These issues are not really a bug and more of a exploit of intended mechanics, which make is difficult to come up with a fix.

Thanks for making an amazing game, I just looked through all of the new stuff over the past few hours and found all the issues I have posted today, I most likely will not respond to these posts as the accounts I used to make them are temporary.

Edited Wednesday at 06:32 by BugReportTempAccount2

[Seleucids]

1. Are you playing A27 or A23? Don't think siege can be captured now.

2. Most of these exploits can be solved by setting fixed diplomacy

3. In Mainland Standard Settings there won't be any Gaia soldiers on the map

4. Each person is only allowed to have a certain amount (20?) towers and dogs. Forts even less.

But nice thoughts! 

[Gurken Khan]

1 hour ago, Seleucids said:

3. In Mainland Standard Settings there won't be any Gaia soldiers on the map

4. Each person is only allowed to have a certain amount (20?) towers and dogs. Forts even less.

With decay there are no Gaia soldiers necessary for buildings to go to Gaia. I also don't see how extra kennels would help with the limit of dogs. While it's true that you can build above the limit if you lose/build/recapture I consider it more of a hypothetical for TGs; you'd probably get wrecked while playing around with it.

[Seleucids]

51 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

I consider it more of a hypothetical for TGs; you'd probably get wrecked while playing around with it.

Yeah totally. I've played hundreds if not thousands of TGs. I've seen less than 10 wonders built (in non troll games) in my entire 0ad career. In most cases people don't even build forts and towers (especially me) unless there is a serious risk of early inf push.

[BugReportTempAccount3]

12 hours ago, Seleucids said:

1. Are you playing A27 or A23? Don't think siege can be captured now.

I was playing a27 and did not test that either, just assumed based on past alphas. 

12 hours ago, Seleucids said:

2. Most of these exploits can be solved by setting fixed diplomacy

If this makes it so buildings do not decay to Gaia when not near a territory root then it would. I can not confirm what this does though right now. I assume it prevents you from changing teams which would not fix any exploits.

12 hours ago, Seleucids said:

3. In Mainland Standard Settings there won't be any Gaia soldiers on the map

This does not rely on soldiers but the fact that all buildings with no territory root near convert to Gaia.

12 hours ago, Seleucids said:

4. Each person is only allowed to have a certain amount (20?) towers and dogs. Forts even less.

This bypasses the limit on dogs as each kennel gives 10 more to the limit now, I have tested this and made 100 dogs with ten kennels. This should bypass fort limits too but I have not tested that.

11 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

it more of a hypothetical for TGs; you'd probably get wrecked while playing around with it.

It is mostly impractical in competitive games, but I believe that dog kennels are exploitable enough to be potentially competitive.

Dog kennels are super easy to convert, small, and don't even require a tower as a few farmsteads can allow you to remove them from your border.

In longer games with more people this becomes stronger.

Edited Wednesday at 21:45 by BugReportTempAccount3
Mistake

[Stan`]

9 minutes ago, BugReportTempAccount3 said:

This bypasses the limit on dogs as each kennel gives 10 more to the limit now, I have tested this and made 100 dogs with ten kennels. This should bypass fort limits too but I have not tested that.

That sounds like a bug. The limit should be global not per building. Also weren't kennels removed ?

[BugReportTempAccount3]

1 minute ago, Stan` said:

Also weren't kennels removed ?

I was able to build them in alpha 27, they have been added back it appears. They were not in alpha 26 I remember.

[Seleucids]

7 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Also weren't kennels removed ?

They have returned in A27 as an official feature. Not sure why it was removed or why it returned. It is not a particularly OP item so no whines about it yet. 

 

I tested all of the things mentioned above, the decay then capture exploit does exist (except for siege). These are very creative and meticulous observations. However, nobody has ever tried to exploit these in a TG. Building houses to extend territory then delete is quite a large waste of wood and time. Not sure if it is actually advantageous in most standard TGs. The territory influence is actually quite strong for a single tower; you are going to need about 4 houses out to achieve this with certainty - 300 wood spent. Then, the gaia tower will shoot and hurt your units if you go back and re-capture. I lost 4 slingers just to get 3 towers up this way and it's not even that dense. 

 

[BugReportTempAccount3]

5 minutes ago, Seleucids said:

They have returned in A27 as an official feature. Not sure why it was removed or why it returned. It is not a particularly OP item so no whines about it yet. 

 

I tested all of the things mentioned above, the decay then capture exploit does exist (except for siege). These are very creative and meticulous observations. However, nobody has ever tried to exploit these in a TG. Building houses to extend territory then delete is quite a large waste of wood and time. Not sure if it is actually advantageous in most standard TGs. The territory influence is actually quite strong for a single tower; you are going to need about 4 houses out to achieve this with certainty - 300 wood spent. Then, the gaia tower will shoot and hurt your units if you go back and re-capture. I lost 4 slingers just to get 3 towers up this way and it's not even that dense. 

 

You can use farmsteads instead. I remember stone walls giving territory too. You can do two kennels each time you do this.

[Stan`]

15 minutes ago, Seleucids said:

They have returned in A27 as an official feature. Not sure why it was removed

Because they were not accurate. Instead they should have been made a special upgrade to the Brit stable.

[Genava55]

 

 

[BugReportTempAccount4]

2 hours ago, Stan` said:

That sounds like a bug. The limit should be global not per building. Also weren't kennels removed ?

Even if the limit becomes global, the issue remains for all existing buildings, all future buildings, and this still allows dog kennels to be made to train dogs faster. (I do believe that training dogs faster is not that big of a deal and the existing building's limits being bypassed is not that strong, but it makes it harder to balance buildings in the future.)

The best solution I can think of is to make limited buildings get destroyed when captured by an enemy or Gaia as they are all civilization exclusive and it could be argued in a real war they would be burned down.

Another way to solve it would be to make the buildings not decay to Gaia that are limited, but that still leaves the exploit of a teammate not on your team being able to capture them and allow you to make more.

I believe that bypassing the spacing limits between buildings using this method is far to inconvenient to be useful and not being able to place towers near other peoples towers would be no fun so I think it should be ignored.

Edited yesterday at 00:33 by BugReportTempAccount4
clarification

[BugReportTempAccount5]

56 minutes ago, BugReportTempAccount4 said:

The best solution I can think of is to make limited buildings get destroyed when captured by an enemy or Gaia as they are all civilization exclusive and it could be argued in a real war they would be burned down.

This would not work with Wonders, which are supposed to be captured.